The trouble with trolls: Black Panther, Rotten Tomatoes and the flipside of fandom

Social media and review aggregator sites are critical tools in marketing movies these day, but they can also be hijacked by those hoping to bury them.

By Karl Quinn

8 February 2018 — 6:32pm

For a brief moment this week, Black Panther scored a rare 100 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes – until Irish critic Ed Power weighed in with his miserly three-star review, thus dragging it down a whole point.

That's as close to universal acclaim as a movie gets, but when the audience scores come after it opens to the general public next week, don't be surprised if Black Panther's rating takes a tumble.

Rotten Tomatoes has become a battleground in the culture wars, and the only thing more likely to inflame the so-called alt-right than a female superhero (hello Wonder Woman) is a black one.

Black Panther is an unabashed rallying cry to black power, a debate about the best path to justice for African-Americans masquerading as a superhero film. OK, it is a superhero film too. But in pitting two versions of the titular character against each other – one advocating violent revolution, a la Malcolm X, the other a Martin Luther King-informed philosophy of patience and reserve – it is also the most interesting and politically charged superhero movie since the first Captain America film (that one was a meditation on propaganda and the machinery of war, in case you're wondering).

But she's a girl: Daisy Ridley as Rey in the rebooted female-led Star Wars.

Photo: AP

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Little wonder the right had it in its sights even before anyone had seen it.

The other weekend, Facebook took the unusual step of shutting down a group calling itself Down with Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys, allegedly for violating community standards. The group was promoting as an "event" a campaign to "Give Black Panther a rotten audience score on Rotten Tomatoes". By the time it was shut down, 3700 people had indicated their intention to participate. Another 1800 were considering it.

The group claimed to be motivated by a belief that critics are being "bought off" by Disney to support the direction it has taken with Star Wars and its Marvel movies. It also claims those critics are being unduly harsh on rival studio Warner Bros' DC superhero films.

What have you done with Max?: Charlize Theron's Furiosa was the real hero of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Whoever was responsible, there was certainly a huge pile-on on the latest Star Wars film. While it holds a 91 per cent rating from critics, it has an audience score of just 48 per cent. There are tens of thousands of audience reviews, and many of them take aim at a perceived bias in the film towards "girl power", forcing the sort of "social agendas" favoured by SJWs (social justice warriors), and "virtue signalling" through its diversity of cast.

"This film is a complete PC joke if you are a real fan of Star Wars this will make you vomit," is fairly typical of the negativity (right down to the dodgy punctuation).

From bad to diverse: Some fanboys are furious at the casting of John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran.

Photo: Jonathan Olley

Social media trolling from so-called fanboys has become an increasingly potent and potentially damaging factor in the movie business. In 2016, the all-female Ghostbusters found itself the target of an unprecedented stream of vitriol, primarily from men furious that "their" property (the original all-male Ghostbusters) had been hijacked by a feminist agenda. Trailers for the film were down-voted on YouTube at a record rate, IMDB was flooded with negative user reviews, and star Leslie Jones was subjected to a torrent of vile racist and sexist abuse on Twitter.

The film performed disappointingly at the box office, and a mooted sequel was quietly shuffled into the too-hard basket. Chalk it up as a victory to the haters? Maybe.

Poised to pounce ... on the box office: Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther.

Photo: null

A year earlier, Mad Max: Fury Road had drawn the ire of fans angry that the main character of the film was not manly Max (Tom Hardy) but the female Furiosa (Charlize Theron). In December 2015, they were angry again when a woman (Daisy Ridley) emerged as the central figure of the rebooted Star Wars saga. How dare they – how very dare they!

It's not just mainstream movies attracting the ire of those affronted by Hollywood's attempts to present a more diverse view of the world. Moonlight, the film that won the best picture award at the 2017 Oscars, had a user rating of 8.4 (out of 10) on IMDB before the award, but that fell to 7.5 soon after it won. According to one detailed analysis, a sudden influx of negative reviews tinged with racism and homophobia may have been to blame.

Get your hands off our movie: The original Ghostbusters.

Of course, other factors may have been at play too – many people who would not otherwise have watched Moonlight may have sought it out because of the Oscar win, and genuinely found it slow, confusing or unengaging – but there's little doubt people motivated by a range of beliefs are actively targeting films in a bid to sway public sentiment, appetite to see, and ultimately commercial performance.

Fan engagement is, of course, a powerful tool for those making and distributing movies, but it is not easily controlled. Snakes on a Plane (2006), for instance, famously developed a cult following long before it was released, and even incorporated fan feedback into its script, yet still flopped.

Alex Hibbert, foreground, and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight.

Photo: AP

Fearful of a negative response to its big-budget Justice League last year, Warner Bros imposed a review embargo that only lifted the day before the film opened in the US – too late, it presumably hoped, to negatively impact advance ticket sales. It didn't work. The DC film, which reportedly cost $US300 million to make, has taken $US656.3 million worldwide, well short of what it would need to earn to be considered a financial success after marketing and distribution costs. (It has a lowly 40 per cent score from critics but a 77 per cent audience rating.)

Critics of review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes decry the way they foster a herd mentality in audiences, and discourage deeper engagement with critical nuance in favour of a simple, widely disseminated score. "They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film," Martin Scorsese wrote last year. "The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer."

The great irony in all this is that those who stand to lose the most from these services are intimately bound up in them. For a while, News Corp (which owned Fox) controlled Rotten Tomatoes. Now it is owned by the digital ticketing company Fandango, which is in turn co-owned by Viacom (which owns NBC/Universal), with 70 per cent, and Warners (30 per cent).

Consumers can buy movie tickets on Fandango, where they can also see the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.

Would a lower audience score for Black Panther be enough to dissuade some people from seeing it? If so, would an underperforming movie with a black superhero be enough to dissuade Marvel from making another one?

It's hard to say with any certainty. Despite the negativity on Rotten Tomatoes, The Last Jedi has taken more than $US1.32 billion globally. Moonlight has doubled its global haul since the flood of negative reviews on IMDB. And Justice League struggled in spite of the relatively high audience rating. Go figure.

According to one recent analysis, there is absolutely no correlation between critic and audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and box office performance, despite the hollering by studio heads and filmmakers to the contrary.

There's no denying the trolls are a rabid bunch, and their bite can be rather nasty. But it's entirely possible they're barking up the wrong tree.